Ideas for the future

Since early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic came to dominate government policies, global conversations and scholarly attention. Around the world, the pandemic brought unfamiliar levels of government spending and intervention, as well as a sizeable increase in public health awareness. It also prompted new uncertainties about the near and distant future, new questions about how to respond to the losses of the pandemic, and new advocacy that in the present moment should be seen as pivotal in relation to future planning for pandemics, but also in relation to global and racial inequities, and climate change.

Professor Tim Allen, Director of the Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa.

COVID-19 has directly affected CPAID’s ongoing fieldwork in Africa but has, at the same time, foregrounded the significance of a public authority lens. On the one hand, it contributes to understanding such matters as vaccine hesitancy, or incidence of public mutuality in response to public health concerns. On the other hand, it has contributed to analysis of pandemic-related moral panics, and reinforcement of autocratic governance linked to enforced social compliance.

To some degree, building on its longer-term work on public authority and epidemics, notably with respect to Ebola, CPAID has become much involved in researching these issues, and not only in its African research sites. This work is reflected in the new Horizon 2020 Periscope project on COVID-19 in Europe, in which a public authority lens is applied, as well as a host of projects underway in the Centre’s established field-sites.

A CPAID presentation in Gulu, Uganda.

Applying a public authority lens beyond the Global South

The pandemic has pushed CPAID researchers to reflect on the role of public authority in how scholarship (re)understands the present and reimagines the future. In late 2020, CPAID’s core and affiliated researchers were interviewed to discern what a future CPAID 2.0 may look like. In general, it was felt that CPAID should increase efforts to demonstrate more broadly how a public authority lens helpfully unpicks critical dynamics omitted from state-centric approaches. Notably, there was a desire to apply the lens beyond Africa and the Global South, and comparatively address social dynamics in the Global North.

Researchers noted that the rise of popularist leaders, participation in social and protest movements, challenges to ‘mainstream media’ and ‘experts’, and the retreat of cosmopolitanism, points to a gap in academic understandings of localised, sometimes digitally mediated and often transnationally networked public authorities. Furthermore, it suggests that – as CPAID researchers have documented in Africa – state authorities are often adept at using crises to advance their followers’ and their own ends while the power of other public authorities is expanding and changing amidst globalisation.

CPAID insights will continue to be gathered through the strength of bottom-up theory and concept-building based on ethnographically-grounded and conceptually innovative research. Inevitably, the approach will persistently challenge existing analyses of state systems but will also continue to highlight opportunities for insightful ways of seeing, and more effective social policies. The Centre’s work reverses the gaze, rather than scripting African countries as the aberration of a supposed universal norm of statehood, and the approach should be applied elsewhere.

By building a research programme that is based on knowledge exchange, decolonising knowledge production and research networks, and reciprocal capacity-building, CPAID is developing new interpretations for understanding globally the crises of liberal democracy, neo-authoritarianism and democratic ‘backsliding’, and violent conflicts. The next phase of CPAID will push forward comparative projects around select themes established during the first phase, bringing together the study of African and non-African contexts.